Jack Shadoian’s work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Conduit and other magazines. He has written extensively on film, literature, and popular culture, and was, at one time, a reviewer for Rolling Stone, Fusion, and other music magazines. These Foolish Things woke up with el serioso bedhead dent and a crustacean clanking of stiff joints. Stella had applied her pincers to draw blood, and scared me plenty when her sharp incisors got a bit insistent during the blowjob portion of the evening (she coaxed the little yelps she wanted). I figured I must have done something wrong to her body or her mind, but what? women named Stella I find are particularly hard to figure, don’t you think? anyway, we twisted ache-ily down to the beach to fuck, Stella being a glutton for it in the sand ever since she saw that John Holmes movie her dum-dum brother Ernie left in the VCR. I hate doing it in the sand: I hate sand, period. but I love Stella, and to see her face light up, even to my faulty rhythms, enchanted by the fresh air and the soft-warm infinitude of sand, and to observe how my sometimes inadequate member was impressively contributing to her joy, made me oblivious to what might otherwise have unnerved me: the stares and comments of stray passers-by taking what they imagined was a safe stroll on the beach. we were down there pretty long, Stella and I, she radiant, me worn out, the tide doing its programmed incoming/outcoming gestures, sandflies feasting copiously on unresisting flesh, both of us in that state of dead-to-time we liked. when the kiddies started coming down in clumps with their pails and shovels, we got up and left. I was so weak Stella had to drag me up the dune. we had sand all over us. the house was dark, and looking cool with its surrounding trees, the telephone ringing. "but who’s to answer," Stella sang. I tenored back: "oh, how the ghost of you clings!" "that’s wrong," Stella snapped. "that’s wrong." North Dakota Dentistry the water boils for coffee, sound you recognize, but there is none. you forgot. muttering, you turn the burner off; makes no sense to have it boil for naught. behind the door, your patient patients wait to open wide their mouths, old and young. under your watchful, empty gaze, the morning light begins to curiously vanish into the heavy distant mountains, reversing all known precedent. creepy. absentmindedly, you check your instruments: tips, curves, handles, smooth from years of service (are they lined up properly, respectfully, in the order they have come to expect?). there is a faint chatter to the scene you are imagining, like the approach of army ants from somewhere far away, the kind that ate poor Charlton Heston up, and kept you blinking deep into the night, glued to the late show on 9 – what was it called? – THE NAKED JUNGLE, yes, the naked jungle here in North Dakota, people waiting for you out there, offering suffering faces, one of which, you’re pretty certain, placed your hot hand on her fleshy thigh, crashing perfect teeth against your crooked, wired-up ones, beneath the starlit ceiling of The Palace, army ants advancing thunderously to deaf ears so many many years ago – or is that the mere delirium of having drilled a million fillings? you open the door. days someone could love you come and go. is this the way things are in South Dakota too?